Neither entirely fiction nor nonfiction, but a story of true crime and a real-life thriller.

For over a century, men have mined gold from the Orbiel Valley north of Carcassonne, and with it always comes poison: arsenic. The owners hailed from Belgium, Australia, and Paris, but the laborers who risked their health and lives from nearby fields and vineyards, all for the promise of riches. So it is that from the 1890s till now water and soil have been the bearers of endless death. The families depicted in this book‒portraits that span a hundred years, through world wars and workers' struggles, the French Resistance and economic depressions‒come to resemble a gallery of history's victims.